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War Of The Worlds 1938 Radio Broadcast with Orson Welles

by: Mercury Theatre - Orson Welles - CBS

Publication date: 1938-10-30

Usage: Public Domain Mark 1.0

Topics: H.G. Wells, Orson Welles, 1930s, Old Time Radio, Halloween, Mercury Theatre

Language: English

In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of this radio broadcast and Halloween, I present this vinyl rip I've made of the War of the Worlds, as done in 1938 by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre.

I have included two versions here at multiple bitrates and filetypes.

On one, the only editing I've done is to attach the two sides of the record.

On the cleaned version, I did a minor amount of EQ and ran it through some mild cleaning processes anyone can do to remove some pops and things. I am by no means an expert, if someone takes the unedited version and cleans it better than I did, please let us know!

Here is a version here on the archive that was here before mine if you prefer

ALSO: Here is a very cool VR spatialized version from Archive.org user magicass98 that uses this version as a source. I highly recommend you check it out, and use those headphones! Check it out on YouTube. Thanks to magicass98 for making it and letting us know about it.

From it's Wikipedia page:

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over theColumbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

Addeddate: 2013-10-30 16:06:21

Identifier: WarOfTheWorlds1938RadioBroadcast256kbps

Scanner: Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.4.1

Source: 58:02

Year: 1938

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Reviewer: magicass98 - - October 18, 2018
Subject: Usage

Used this for a VR version, added some lowpass and spatialized it. Great quality file.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUC_upN2Bys&feature=youtu.be

Reviewer: eauxdartifice - - January 30, 2015
Subject: Not really a review...

Thanks for getting back to me so quickly (today I learnt how difficult it is to contact other IA users...).
Like you I'm trying to clean up these recordings, I've finished the first 18 but it's such a shame to rely on REALLY poor MP3 rips as source material (except this one) - I'll let you know if I get anywhere (the website with the remastered MP3s will be up in a week or 2!).

Reviewer: bobdylansdead - - January 30, 2015
Subject: Response to the Non-Review

I sure wish you could contact me about getting some high quality Welles's recordings, because that would mean that I have them. I found this War of the Worlds broadcast on vinyl and that's the only reason I was able to upload this one.

If I ever find anything else and it's PD I'll make sure to post it though!

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